Spain to donate vaccines and cash to COVAX programme

A DONATION of 15 million vaccines and €50 million will be made via the World Health Organisation (WHO)'s COVAX programme, a community initiative seeking help from the planet's richest nations to guarantee immunisation for developing countries, according to Spain's president Pedro Sánchez.

A Doctors Without Borders worker treating a Covid patient in Brazil, a country with sharp contrasts of rich and poor which has been particularly badly hit by the pandemic. Latin America in general will benefit from Spain's donation of 7.5 million vaccines (photo: *Médicos Sin Fronteras*, MSF or Doctors Without Borders)

This is in addition to the 7.5 million vaccines Spain has already promised Latin America.

During the virtual 'Gavi COVAX Advance Market Commitment' summit on vaccination and the fight against the pandemic, Sánchez stressed that 'only through solidarity can we overcome the crisis'.

He said Spain has so far contributed around €180m to the international aid programme to help stop Covid-19 in the developing and third world.

Reiterating that the first world would only be safe when the third world also was, and that 'none of us are safe until all of us are', the national leader says Spain 'firmly supports' the European Union's mechanisms for sharing vaccines with countries which do not have the funds to order in enough doses for their entire population.

He is also in favour of 'more flexible' approaches to vaccine patents, since these – according to Doctors Without Borders, which is campaigning hard for them to be scrapped – would prevent their universal access worldwide.

Sánchez called for patents to be 'relaxed' in order to 'increase and improve manufacturing and distribution'.

Spain's National Research Council (CSIC), which most of the top scientists based in the country

belong to or have links with, also backs the WHO's initiative of an 'open licence' for creating new diagnostic tests.

At the moment, the price of PCRs is prohibitive for less well-off countries, meaning the contact tracing and testing systems in place in the richer nations – which have been key to preventing an even worse catastrophe and heightened mortality rate – are beyond the possibilities of most of the planet.

It is not clear which brand of vaccines Spain will donate, or whether its contribution will include a mixture of all of those in current use.